I wrote a post recently on the reaction of homosexuals to the Orlando massacre. Despite the gunman being a Muslim linked to ISIS, the initial reaction of many homosexuals was to express hostility toward white Christians.

Over at The Orthosphere, Richard Cocks has a post addressing this phenomenon. At one point in his post he writes:

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, most of my students think that the greater horror they can “tolerate” the better people they are...

This reminded me of Lawrence Auster's First Law of Majority-Minority Relations in a Liberal Society. This Law (he was writing about a decade ago) he defined as follows:

The more troublesome, unassimilable, or dangerous a designated minority or non-Western group actually is, the more favorably it is treated. This undeserved favorable treatment of a troublesome or misbehaving group can take numerous forms, including celebrating the group, giving the group greater rights and privileges, covering up the group’s crimes and dysfunctions, attacking the group’s critics as racists, and blaming the group’s bad behavior on white racism.

It's possible that what Richard Cocks observed amongst his students goes some way to explaining Auster's Law. If you believe that the worse the behaviour you can tolerate the better a person you are, then the more dangerously a minority group behaves the more you will deflect blame from the group, preferring to target the majority instead. This is what homosexual liberals did after Orlando: they proved their commitment to tolerance (meaning a willingness to tolerate the "other") by stridently attacking the mainstream.

Why would a liberal society develop along these lines? It flows logically from liberal first principles.

If you think there is nothing of inherent worth external to the individual, then what matters is the act of autonomous will in self-determining one's own subjective, self-created values. The important thing is the freedom to self-determine (the choices themselves don't really matter, rather it is the unencumbered act of choosing that brings value).

But if this is a value for me then it must be so for others too. So there must be a system within which I get to have my autonomous choice respected, whilst at the same time I respect the choices of others. This then generates a liberal morality, despite the liberal starting point of believing that there is nothing of objective value existing as part of the nature of things.

The liberal morality is based on the idea of non-interference in autonomous choice making, and this makes qualities such as respect, openness, non-discrimination, non-judgementalism and tolerance key moral terms in a liberal society. Therefore, the more tolerant you are, by the standards of a liberal morality, the better a person you are.

Of course, if you are thought to violate the principles of tolerance, then you won't be tolerated but instead attacked for bigotry, discrimination, racism, sexism, homophobia and so on. And it is easy to violate the principles of liberal tolerance, because once you assert that there is any objective truth for people to be guided by, or non-liberal institutions or traditions for people to love and identify with, then you are violating liberal first principles (particularly if you assert any of these as public, rather than as merely private, goods.)

I know this gets complex in the end. Liberals end up supporting a less tolerant religion rather than a more tolerant one in the name of tolerance. But there is a kind of logic to it, if you accept the liberal starting point. If being tolerant is what makes you a good person morally, then you demonstrate this by being willing to tolerate in your society the most challenging "other" group and explaining their wrongdoing on the faults of your own society or tradition.

Wednesday, June 29, 2016

I've never experienced an election campaign that has so failed to ignite any interest amongst the electorate. None of my work colleagues have spoken about it once, nor is it featuring on social media. It's a terrible situation in the sense that there is nobody rocking the boat at all. The left-liberal vs right-liberal cosy, comfortable orthodoxy is very much alive and well in Australia. Real political interest lies overseas.

So who might a traditionalist vote for in these elections? I'm happy for readers to discuss this in the comments. In my seat, there is no-one at all to vote for in the House of Representatives, so that is a non-issue. In the Senate there is at least some choice. Here in Victoria, I think the best option might be to vote for Georgia Nicholls of the Sustainable Australia Party. They have been running some well produced TV ads, arguing the case for lower immigration. They are by no means a traditionalist party, but at least we can support them in their aim of lowering immigration from 200,000 per year back to 70,000. Here is a video they have produced:

South Australian readers might like to consider voting for Senator Cory Bernardi.

A thought. I'm sure most men have experienced in their lives a strong feeling of desire for a woman, such that he wished to possess that woman in mind, body and soul. In sex a man sometimes feels this instinct to possess. The counterpoint for a woman is to give herself, to yield, to belong. But to do this she must see the man as worthy of her. And, more than this, in giving way she makes herself vulnerable and therefore there must be trust.

Does feminism promote trust between men and women? I don't think so. Feminism urges women to believe that we live in a rape culture; that domestic violence is widespread amongst all social classes, with men always being the perpetrators; that men go out to work to keep women down; that women must be independent of men; that men and women are locked in a political contest for power and status; that women are oppressed on all measures for the benefit of men and so on.

How can young women raised in these beliefs trust men? And if women cannot trust men, then how can they "let go" in relationship with a man? One part of the relationship dynamic between men and women is then lost. One aspect of the feminine is then lost.

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Welsh actor John Rhys-Davies has given an interview in which he clearly steps outside the usual narrative:

In the past you have called Britain “pretty morally vacuous”. Are there discussions that as a society we’re just not having?
That’s exactly it. We have such intellectually inadequate leaders that you just wince. Cameron, Brown and Blair must be the least qualified men to govern a country that we’ve had in 200 years. When you look at a politician, the first question you should ask is, does this man love his people? Will this man put his country first? That’s not the only quality we want, but the really successful politicians of our time – Putin, Salmond – are people who actually do put their countries first.

Benedict Cumberbatch was among nearly 300 arts figures who have publicly backed remaining in the EU. Why should people listen to what actors have to say?.
They shouldn't necessarily. Every actor has a right to his opinion; they [Cumberbatch & co] are, of course, completely wrong. Their generation has been brought up without a sense of national identity. They have lived protected in the world. The world is at a more dangerous time now than it’s been since I was doing my Cambridge entrance exams in Cuba week. We have a desperately inadequate American president and he has allowed the wolves to get strong, and now the wolves are gathering.

There's an interesting post up at Gallia Watch. A French businessman and Paris councillor, Charles Beigbeder, has praised the Brexit result. Here is an abridged version of what he had to say (he begins by serving it up to the EU elite):

Cursed be the promoters of undifferentiated cultures and standardization of life styles. They will be forced to accept the praise of uniqueness that leads a people to refuse being blended into an amorphous mass in which it will feel the loss of its identity to the benefit of a multiculturalist destroyer;

Cursed be the believers in the progress of history, for whom European nations will sooner or later be led to dissolve into an ever more vast melting pot, mixing together peoples and cultures. At last they will understand that the economy cannot be the primary foundation of social ties, and that if there exists a European identity, there is not, as of today, a European nation or people;

Cursed be the no-borders ideologues who wish to knock down the borders of nation-States. They will learn that in times of migratory turbulence such as the one Europe is currently experiencing, it is better for a sovereign State to control its borders, lest the country become a sieve;

And blessed today are Her Majesty's subjects, who have given to all of Europe a tremendous lesson in democracy…This proud and subtle people, rooted in its traditions and enamored of freedom, has not finished surprising us.

There is a domestic violence campaign running in Australia at the moment which, despite all evidence to the contrary, continues to portray men alone as the perpetrators of violence. There is a petition running at change.org which asks the Australian government to run these campaigns more fairly, in a way that does not single out and demonise men. It's worth supporting. Link below.

Saturday, June 25, 2016

I hope to write a few posts in coming days on the Brexit win. I thought, though, that I would begin with Donald Trump. His reaction to the winning vote is further evidence, I believe, that he is not just another right-liberal Republican. Read it and see if you agree:

The people of the United Kingdom have exercised the sacred right of all free peoples.

They have declared their independence from the European Union, and have voted to reassert control over their own politics, borders and economy.

A Trump Administration pledges to strengthen our ties with a free and independent Britain, deepening our bonds in commerce, culture and mutual defense.

The whole world is more peaceful and stable when our two countries – and our two peoples – are united together, as they will be under a Trump Administration.

Come November, the American people will have the chance to re-declare their independence. Americans will have a chance to vote for trade, immigration and foreign policies that put our citizens first.

They will have the chance to reject today’s rule by the global elite, and to embrace real change that delivers a government of, by and for the people.

I hope America is watching, it will soon be time to believe in America again.

He also posted the following messages on Twitter:

On the national issue, at least, Trump is pulling political debate back in the right direction. It seems to me that there are two fields of politics. There is the field you operate in at a more purist level, where you try to articulate your politics in a logical and principled way and clearly distinguish your politics from the competition. Then there is the field where you don't necessarily expect your own purist vision to be fully implemented, but instead you join in a struggle to pull things in society your own way.

The two fields don't run counter to each other. The more that you try to build up a stronger, purer principled movement, the more weight you have in drawing things your own way. And the more you succeed in bringing the centre toward your own politics, the more success you are likely to have in building your more purist movement.

So we shouldn't look at Trump just through purist eyes, but at what his effect on the larger political climate is likely to be. I might be wrong, but I think he will shake it up, open it up, in a good way. I think he will unsettle the right-liberal hold over the Republican Party, open up debate on the national issue, and even perhaps (as suggested above) reconfigure international alliances in an interesting way.

In the meantime, our task remains the same - to develop a principled political movement that can be one part of those forces pulling the larger political culture in our direction.

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Not that things were perfect when I was growing up, but there was still a sense in the culture that Australian men had shown strength and courage as settlers, as soldiers and in sports. It was a positive identity.

And there was still a sense of an "us" when it came to men and women. We seem to be sliding ever further along the line of women seeing men, their own men, as being the opposition, the ones they have to dethrone.

One positive development is that numbers of young Western men are going back to trying to develop their strengths "parallel" to their relationships with women, i.e. they are doing it regardless of what their relationship with women happens to be.

Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Terry McCrann is a leading business commentator here in Australia, with a regular column for the mass circulation Herald Sun. In today's column (hidden behind a paywall), he gives his view on the referendum in Britain on leaving the EU.

In short, he believes that Britain should leave. Why? First, he thinks that Britain is better off without the expensive Brussels gravy train:

Goodness, gracious me, if enough countries decide to walk away from paying out the billions to tens of thousands of Brussels bureacrats, who knows where that might end? Who knows which teat might run dry next?

He then looks at the claim that Brexit will cause the markets to fall. It is his opinion that unless people deliberately talk themselves into scaring the markets, a market fall following Brexit needn't happen, and even if the scare tactics do have this effect, it will be short lived and the markets will bounce back.

He believes that Brexit will ultimately be good for the British economy, by liberating it:

That opportunity would be leveraged by the fact that exiting Europe would in substance be hugely beneficial economically and financially for the UK and especially England - freed from the oppressive overlay of not just bureaucratic Brussels, but the extortion racket that the Euro is for Germany.

Finally, Terry McCrann believes that the economic arguments are not the only reason for favouring Brexit:

The bigger point is not financial. It is the fundamental one of national and individual sovereignty - to have your individual and shared destinies decided by yourselves under law, not by foreign unelected bureaucrats and foreign governments elected by others and in some cases, by themselves.

...Here's a final point...It is or should be blindingly clear that exiting the EU is the only way the UK is going to regain control of its borders - to determine who and how many come to it not only from outside Europe but inside Europe as well...

...the British have to seize back their sovereignty from the people smugglers in Brussels and Berlin.

The Herald Sun is the largest circulation newspaper here in Victoria. It has carried out a readers' survey for the upcoming federal election, with some interesting results. For instance:

94% believe boats carrying asylum seekers should be turned back.
92% are against taxes being increased to further subsidise childcare costs
86% are against the introduction of a carbon tax
86% are against transgender awareness being taught in primary schools
74% are against Australia becoming a republic
64% are against legalising same sex marriage

It shows, at least, that more people than you might imagine are able to think outside of the elite consensus.

The same sex marriage one is interesting as this will become a big issue after the election. 71% of coalition voters are against it, despite the PM favouring it.

It should be noted that Herald Sun readers are not a representative sample of the population at large, but even so the numbers are interesting.

Saturday, June 18, 2016

Leftists can be more open about what they post to social media than those of us on the right. As I have quite a few leftist friends and relatives on my feed, I get to know what really interests them politically.

Generally, they are only interested in what happens in Australia and America. And their overwhelming interest lies with the idea of white male privilege. It is what I have come to call "shakedown politics". You spot something that white men have (e.g. greater representation on a board) and you roar mightily about white male privilege, because you see the chance to get something out of your activism (i.e. board places). But if 16 Yazidi women are brutally murdered by ISIS in the Middle East for refusing to become sex slaves, it doesn't even make it onto your radar.

What I noticed about leftist messaging in the run up to the Orlando massacre, was something like the following:

Day 1: All white men are privileged, give us their stuff.
Day 2: All white men are privileged, give us their stuff.
Day 3: All white men are privileged, give us their stuff.
Day 4: Muslim massacres 50 gay people at a nightclub.
Day 5: Rage at Christians, white men are just as bad as Muslim men or worse.
Day 6: Why can't we have love and unity?

Clearly, there is a blind spot in leftist politics here. They don't see that the envy/rage/hatred towards white men (ressentiment?) runs counter to calls for love and unity.

The hostility toward white men seems, if anything, to be picking up steam. You have to wonder where it will end. To give just one example, you might be aware of the sad event that occurred at a Disney resort in Florida where a young boy was taken by an alligator. A prominent white feminist from Chicago (apparently a corporate lawyer) responded by tweeting the following:

The dating website eHarmony analysed 12,000 profiles and came up with a list of the worst five words for men to use on a dating profile. If a man used these words, his profile would attract fewer responses by the percentages listed:

Seemingly, a man being caring and respectful is a turn off for women when it comes to attraction (presumably it's not what women associate with masculine charisma).

I wouldn't conclude that being caring and respectful is wrong, but I don't think men should expect these qualities to get them far when it comes to attraction.

Monday, June 13, 2016

I know some gay people well enough to keep up with their political views. They obsessively attack white men whilst at the same time supporting Islamic immigration. It has never seemed prudent to me - why seek to deconstruct the people who let you be and replace them with people who are likely to attack you?

So I was interested to see what their response would be to the massacre of gays in Orlando Florida by a Muslim man. It took a few hours for the following to appear:

Instead of using reality to test his beliefs, he is simply doubling down on his belief system. He targets conservative Christians as the enemy, despite the shooter being a Muslim (and, it seems, a registered Democrat). He blames nationalism, despite the fact that it was an open borders internationalism that brought the shooter to Orlando. Finally, he claims that these attacks will continue to take place unless we go even further along the path of opening ourselves to those who wish us harm.

The left is not going to solve this, not even when reality slaps them hard in the face. They can be mugged by reality over and over and it will not change the grip that their political ideology has over them.

Saturday, June 11, 2016

Laurie Penny is a radical English feminist. In a column for the New Statesman she has called for women to walk away from marriage. There are passages in her column which are very significant, as they reveal what feminism is really pushing toward. So I'd encourage readers to persevere with this post as it touches on fundamentals.

She begins by asking whether marriage is "worth it for women who value their personal autonomy." Straight from the beginning you can see that she has adopted the liberal ideal that the highest good in life is personal autonomy. Feminism, therefore, becomes the attempt to maximise personal autonomy for women (it is assumed by feminists that men already have this precious commodity).
So why does marriage harm women's personal autonomy? Laurie Penny gives an unusual answer: she claims that it involves unpaid emotional labour. The idea seems to be that women are being exploited by undertaking emotional labour within marriage that is not remunerated.

I don't want to dwell on this as it's not the most significant aspect of Laurie Penny's article. I will just point out that it is very odd for someone like Penny who is supposedly anti-capitalist to conceptualise something as intimate as marriage in terms of the market. It is also blinkered for Penny not to recognise that husbands also "perform unpaid emotional labour" in a marriage; in fact, on men's sites there are complaints that men do too great a share of this within modern relationships (which happens to be my experience.)

What Laurie Penny writes next is reasonably important:

Not so long ago, marriage was most women’s only option if they wanted financial security, children who would be considered legitimate, social status and semi-regular sex. Our foremothers fought for the right to all of those things outside the confines of partnership, and today the benefits of marriage and monogamy are increasingly outweighed by the costs.

Feminists wanted women to be autonomous and to have the goods that women traditionally obtained within marriage without having to be married. In doing so, marriage inevitably took a mighty hit - Laurie Penny herself believes that in taking away the goods of marriage feminists have made the costs of marriage greater than the benefits for women.

But the key part of Laurie Penny's column comes next. What is the next step for feminism in liberating women? Well, according to Penny there still remains one little problem. When women shun marriage they might well have access to welfare, but they don't have access to a husband's earnings and so are not as well off as married women financially:

there's still a price to pay for choosing not to pair up...It’s also about the money. Over half of Americans earning minimum wage or below are single women – and single mothers are five times as likely to live in poverty as married ones. This has been taken as proof that marriage is better for women – when it should, in fact, be a sign that society must do more, and better, to support women’s choices

And here is where Laurie Penny is unusually honest. She says outright what others would might try to obscure. She approvingly quotes another feminist writer to the effect that the state should be expected to act as the husband of single women, guaranteeing the same sort of income that married women might expect:

Traister is relaxed about the prospect of single women asking that the support a husband might once have provided be publicly available. “In looking to the government to support their ambitions, choices and independence through better policy,” she writes, “Single women are asserting themselves as citizens in ways that American men have for generations.”

Now, it has to be said that this would only be one more step along the same feminist path that we have already travelled a long way along. The state already acts as husband to sole mothers. It already enacts laws allowing women to divorce husbands and continue to live off their husband's earnings. So no wonder that Laurie Penny thinks she is on a winner.

But if marriage is already teetering, then this would surely finish it off - which is Laurie Penny's stated intention. She writes that she believes "in dismantling the social and economic institutions of marriage and family".

Like the feminists of the early 1900s, she believes that by dismantling marriage you would then have "pure" relationships between men and women, equal relationships based on love alone.

I believe in all of that not despite my squishy, tender heart, but because of it. I’m a romantic. I think love needs to be freed from the confines of the traditional, monogamous, nuclear family – and so do women...In the real world, love is perhaps the one truly infinite, renewable resource we have – and it’s beyond time that we had more options. I want more options for myself, and I want them for all of us, not just as a feminist, but as a romantic, too – because it’s the only chance we have of one day, at last, meeting and mating as true equals.

She is deluded, just like the first-wave feminists. The reality is that when you don't need anything from the opposite sex, you don't form "pure" attachments, you become fussy, demanding, ungrateful and unrealistic toward the opposite sex. If Laurie Penny's policy were really to get off the ground, then you could expect women to treat men worse, not better. Women would probably find themselves even less willing to commit to relationships and confused about the reasons why - but probably believing that the available men were just not quite good enough for them.

The moral of the story? If we want to have a successful culture of family life then we need to reject the idea that personal autonomy is always and everywhere the highest good in life, the one that defines freedom. We also need to maintain or even attempt to restore the goods of marriage, the goods that were carelessly subverted by the state in modern times.

Thursday, June 09, 2016

I want to make clear at the start that I do not support the politics of Malcolm Turnbull, Australia's current PM. He is very much a right-liberal rather than a conservative of any sort. When he took power, he chose to speak as follows:

This has been a very important, sobering experience today. I am very humbled by it. I am very humbled by the great honour and responsibility that has been given to me today. We need to have in this country, and we will have now, an economic vision, a leadership that explains the great challenges and opportunities that we face.

...This will be a thoroughly Liberal Government. It will be a thoroughly Liberal Government committed to freedom, the individual and the market. It will be focused on ensuring that in the years ahead, as the world becomes more and more competitive, and greater opportunities arise, we are able to take advantage of that. The Australia of the future has to be a nation that is agile, that is innovative, that is creative.

His primary vision is of the freedom of the individual in the market. It's an exceptionally limited view of man and his purposes.

However, it is hard to deny that Malcolm Turnbull has an extraordinary life story. We have an election campaign running in Australia at the moment. For a while the Labor opposition chose to attack Turnbull as being an out of touch, born-to-rule type. That's a little odd for two reasons. First, the Labour leader, Bill Shorten, is not exactly a battler type himself. In 2009 he married the daughter of the then Governor-General of Australia. And he went to school with me - at Xavier College, not exactly part of struggle town (I don't remember much about him at school).

Second, Malcolm Turnbull was not exactly born with a silver spoon in his mouth. His mother, Coral Lansbury, abandoned the family when he was nine-years-old, choosing to live overseas, first in New Zealand and then in America (she was a second cousin to the actress Angela Lansbury). She became a thrice married socialist feminist academic and novelist.

And so Malcolm Turnbull was left to be raised by his father, Bruce Turnbull. It would have been easy for his father to sink, and for a while father and son lived in modest circumstances in Sydney. But his father battled his way through what must have been a personal tragedy and in later life became successful in his career field.

Father and son

He not only kept himself going strong, he also raised alone as a single father a future prime minister. Malcom Turnbull speaks of his father (who died in a plane crash) with great admiration as someone who loved him and who dedicated much of his life to him.

But the Australian left seems to have chosen to mock or dismiss all this rather than to respect it. Here's one response:

“I wouldn’t be where I am today without my dad,” reveals Turnbull.

Which is actually true. Indeed, Malcolm wouldn’t be anything without his father… sperm being a fairly vital component in the formation of all humanoids.

There's also been a twitter campaign based on the tag #MalcolmWasSoPoor making fun of Turnbull's life story.

Maybe I'm just not ruthless enough and I should take any chance to stick the knife into my political enemies just like the leftists do. But I can't do it in this case. Father and son got through something together that must have been crushing for both. I admire the dedication of the father and the willingness of both father and son to overcome personal adversity. I don't see why this can't be acknowledged.

Tuesday, June 07, 2016

There is a clear winner for traditionalist of the month. Alexander Gauland is the deputy leader of AfD in Germany (Alternative for Germany). On Germany television yesterday he stated clearly that open borders will have the negative effect of gradually replacing the existing German people. He spoke on the issue calmly and clearly.

My favourite part is when he states: "I want to keep this country as we have inherited it from our forefathers. And it should remain this way..."

You'll notice that a Professor Patzelt was brought in to respond to Alexander Gauland. Patzelt did not follow the narrative either. He agreed with Alexander Gauland that the existing German population would effectively be replaced through a process of ongoing immigration, but unlike Gauland, he supports this on the ground that Germans are not having enough children (which they aren't).

The interviewer is clearly perturbed by the fact that her subjects are talking about the German people being changed or replaced by immigration, but she is showing a lack of logic and foresight in shying away from recognising this. As much as I disagree with Professor Patzelt's support of open borders, at least he is willing to acknowledge the logical consequences of the policy.

I have some personal experience with a handful of Somali boys. They are friendly to me, but I have noticed that they have a significant interest in the topic of gangs and violence (they look up to those in the Apex gang). It doesn't bode well.

Thursday, June 02, 2016

The Labour Parties once claimed to represent the working classes. No more. Here is one clear example of the "new labour" mentality. Pat Glass is a shadow minister for Europe for the British Labour Party. She spoke recently at a rally in support of the UK remaining in the EU. This is what she advised the crowd to do:

Well, take a bow older white British men. You are the patriots and the last to bend to the big, moneyed, globalist interests. The Labour Party doesn't want you, it believes you are part of the problem to be swept away. I hope you don't go down without a fight.

Wednesday, June 01, 2016

The Dalai Lama has given an interview to a German newspaper in which he expressed intelligent concerns about Germany's open borders refugee policy. Here is the complete text:

Interviewer: What do you feel about the present refugee crisis in Europe?

Dalai Lama: When we look into the face of every single refugee, especially the children and women, we feel their suffering. A person who is better off has the responsibility to help them. On the other hand, there are now too many. Europe, for example Germany, cannot become an Arab country. Germany is Germany. There are so many, that it is difficult in practice. Also, looked at morally I think that these refugees should only be accepted temporarily. The aim should be that they return and help with the reconstruction of their own countries.

He is combining a concern for the refugees (he doesn't recognise that many are economic migrants); with a practical concern about the scale of the influx; with a moral concern that nations are able to retain their own distinctive character; and with another moral concern that people work for the benefit of their own nations.

It's a more sophisticated position than we usually get from our own church or political leaders.